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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 12 Hansard (20 November) . . Page.. 4438 ..

MS DUNDAS (continuing):

However, her major concern is about how ACTPLA is working against her. She feels that, because she is a member of this community, the government and the bureaucracy should be willing to work with her and not against her on planning ideas. She does not understand why she has to stand up in the AAT and have a government lawyer argue against her when she pays taxes to put this person there. She thinks that there should be another mechanism for working through the issues that are coming through with planning-

Mr Corbell: The authority is the defendant and the decision maker; so it has to defend its decisions.

MS DUNDAS: The minister interjects that they have to defend themselves. This member of the community says that they are not even listening, they are not even willing to work on the issues that are there and come up with another solution. I think that is the key issue with regard to the state of the planning system in the ACT.

I want to talk about public consultation and the willingness of the department to listen to what the community thinks about planning. Yesterday, in a response to the question I asked about community planning forums, which are to replace the local area planning advisory committees or LAPACs, which were shut down in the middle of the year, the minister indicated that he was planning to junk the community planning forums less than two months after their proposed commencement date. I have been receiving a continuous stream of phone calls and correspondence from the community concerned with the minister's disdain for public consultation and the lack of input from local communities about planning and development.

We saw the LAPACs shut down before community planning forums were ready to go, then the composition and duties of the community planning forums were mucked around so that they became just a pale shadow of the LAPACs. The community representatives on the CPFs were all to be appointed by ACTPLA and any elected positions voted for by the community were quickly disposed of. Then we saw the terms of reference for the CPFs restricted so that they could only look at a fraction of the issues that the LAPACs did. Their agendas and meetings were also to be entirely controlled by ACTPLA, so that CPF members would not be able to stray from the script.

After the LAPACs were diluting as far as was possible, the results were really a window dressing forum for the policies of the government, with no real community control or input. Then we saw the call for nominations. Should we be surprised that not many people were interested? Why would anybody want to join a group if they thought it would be a complete waste of time? Who wants to be a puppet for the government? I have even heard concerns expressed by people who were interested in nominating for the community planning forums but found the nomination form very onerous. It called for extensive experience in community and planning work. Of course, the only people who have that experience are people who have been involved in LAPACs. If you want new blood, you have to recognise that you will get new and different ideas and people with different experiences.

However, now it appears that the minister has realised that the CPFs will not work and the idea has been junked, but we still are unclear about what will replace the CPFs or the

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